Real‐time performance via user interfaces to musical structures

This informal and subjective presentation will introduce and compare several software systems written by the myself and others for computer music composition and performance based on higher‐level abstractions of musical data structures. I will then evaluate a few of the issues in real‐time interaction with structural descriptions of musical data. The premise is that very interesting live‐performance software environments could be based in existing technology for structural music description, but that much of the current real‐time performance‐oriented software for music is rather limited in that it supports only very low‐level notions of musical structures. The examples will demonstrate various systems for graphical interaction with procedural, knowledge‐based, hierarchical and/or stochastic music description systems that could be used for live performance.